


The Coffee from the Other Side

by clovershot



Category: Half-Life
Genre: Gen, Just a short action thing, Resonance Cascade, aperture mention, black mesa, poor guy just wanted to sleep in
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-11
Updated: 2020-02-11
Packaged: 2021-02-28 03:55:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22667377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clovershot/pseuds/clovershot
Summary: Gordon decides to be late for work. He finally remembers the name of the entrance guard. Proceeds to have a bad time.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 49





	The Coffee from the Other Side

Bored.

That’s how he felt that morning, riding the Black Mesa tram into work. And a little bit exhilarated, too. He’d been working for almost two months at the Anomalous Materials lab, and hadn’t been late once. His performance had been consistently praised, his coworkers were all on friendly terms with him, and now the exhausted grad student in him resurfaced. So what if he was late for one day? What were they going to do, fire him? With that photo of him in the break room as employee of the month? Not likely. So, Gordon conveniently forgot to set his alarm that morning. He was a little annoyed, then, to find himself waking at the required time anyway, due to his body’s internal clock. When had he stopped being able to sleep in? At least he had the time to walk to the good coffee shop at the other end of the base, the one where all the security guards got their coffee. 

He’d struck up a conversation once with the entry guard, whose name he kept forgetting, and they’d gotten their coffees mixed up for a moment when they’d been set down as the conversation-deprived guard pulled out his wallet to show Gordon his nieces. When they picked up the coffees, they were both surprised to find that the other’s was better. Gordon knew this was a simple case of the grass being greener, but reminded himself to travel to the guard side every once in a while for a treat. He’d noticed the guard didn’t have a coffee one morning and offered his, since he knew there were plenty of spots to get more inside, and the guard (Barnes, he thought) explained that he’d dropped his while getting on the tram, and had been singing his praises ever since and even offered to buy him a beer. He suddenly wondered if the guards’ beer would be better than the science side’s, by the same principle. 

So he found himself sitting on a delightfully empty train, as the pre-recorded announcements rolled and for once, he could hear them. They were boring, but pleasantly so, and for a moment as the train rolled out of one tunnel and into the open air, he felt sort of like a tourist. “ _Visitors have many opportunities to view wildlife in natural surroundings while strolling one of the self-guided nature trails.”_ His mind re-imagined the pleasant woman’s voice as one from a sightseeing car. _“Enjoy a fun ranger-led tour!”_ He pictured himself walking along one of the far mesas, enjoying the dry air and beautiful sunrise… and then the tram rocketed back into darkness, before his eyes adjusted and he saw the end of the line. “We have now reached Black Mesa security point 1. Please exit through the side doors,” announced the automated voice. He walked up the walkway to the door and threw a wave towards the familiar guard. The guard looked surprised.

“They’re waiting for you in there, Freeman,” he said through a bite of a bagel. “Didn’t think you were gonna show up today, to be honest. And personally, I wouldn’t blame you.” Gordon gave the man a puzzled look, and then remembered -- _The test. The goddamn test._ They’d been staging it for weeks, almost as long as Gordon had been hired. Of course he would pick this day to be late on purpose. It’s almost like a dream, he thought, where you’re on stage and can’t remember your line, and you think, _I had one job. Why can’t I remember the line? It doesn’t make sense!_ He had always comforted himself upon waking with the thought that in real life, one doesn’t forget things like that. Except when one does. He hastily thanked the guard (Barney. Name tag said Barney), who called out after him to not forget about that beer he owed Gordon.

A flush started on his cheeks as he strolled quickly down the corridors, with the usual friendly faces all making some comment about his lateness and where he should be headed. When he finally entered the main Anomalous Materials center, Dr. Johansson scowled in his typical way, before adding, “Shouldn’t you be in the suit by now?” Gordon said nothing, slightly angry at himself now, and slid past them down to the locker room. Behind him, he heard the senior scientist murmur something into a phone that Gordon was accounted for and on his way. Johansson had been the director who’d taken the longest to warm up to him. Gordon was starting to feel ashamed at what was likely a regression in that area.

It took several more agonizing minutes before reaching his destination. Gordon shoved his belongings into his personal locker, before going to the front of the room, which had a glass wall looking down into the lab proper. All he could see from this height were white lab coats scurrying around like busy ants. He took his key card off his belt and tapped it into the receiver on the other end of the room, sliding open a blue changing room and revealing the HEV suit, hung up and waiting for him. He would need to be wearing it to go through with the test, and even though his part in the experiment was mundane, it still needed to be done manually in a hazardous environment. And to do that, what with the latent radiation and the unpredictable results, he’d need to be covered almost head to toe. There was a helmet in production somewhere, but he’d been told it wouldn’t be needed for any facility tests, being more geared towards US army contracts rather than actual science work.

The suit was hard to put on, and almost impossible without any assistance. However, Gordon must have missed a bigger portion of the morning than he’d anticipated, as Gina, one of the other AM lab scientists who usually helped him into the damn thing, was gone. _Probably needed downstairs to help set up,_ he thought bitterly, straining his shoulders and wrists trying to undo and redo all the fastenings. He’d always enjoyed putting on the suit before, mainly because Gina was an extremely attractive and intelligent young woman. She outranked him in almost every way, but the way she talked with him made him forget about that. He’d often considered whether or not it would be frowned upon to ask her out, but had decided he liked their daily interactions too much to jeopardize it with unnecessary (and probably unrequited) romantic gestures.

And so, after about 20 minutes of bending and stretching, he was securely in the suit, a light sheen of sweat on his forehead. He was only half listening to the scientists who manually checked the suit, while another bunch readied the test chamber. Gina stood in front of him, likely judging his unprofessional arrival, reading off to him a list of things he had already memorized. Her brows were pinched together in an intriguing way. Get inside. Wait for pressurization. Move crystal to tray. Push crystal into resonator field. Wait for results, relayed to an earpiece, and adjust levels as necessary. Their rival, Aperture, had been developing portal technology using some sort of contained resonance beam, vibrating particles on contact to open slices in dimensional fabric. Mesa’s approach was less portable, but more powerful, and in Gordon’s personal opinion, more practical. The goal was a larger portal, sustainable for longer, without the need for a specialized surface like Aperture’s ridiculously expensive ‘moonpaint’ solution. The air itself would ionize and become the opening. They probably weren’t going to get it on the first try, but it was a start.

Restless. That’s how he felt going into the chamber that would end everything.

***

All he remembers about the moment the crystal was inserted was the way time seemed to dilate and warp. The hairs on his neck were standing on end and it was powerfully quiet, as if all the sound in the world had been momentarily inhaled. Then came the roar. And with it, the light.

He backed away in panic, so fast he tripped over the cart rails and landed flat on his back. Oh, the crystal had hit resonance, alright. Everything had gone exactly according to plan. Except, they hadn’t included in their calculations the energy burst that would accompany the moment. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, and it’s not like they were splitting the atom. They were simply finding the frequency that would cause all the molecules in the contained air to resonate at exactly the same rate. There was no reason to think the energy expelled would be greater than the energy they put in. Gordon knew that the energy used was not insignificant, but this… this was... 

A steel beam fell from high overhead and landed not ten feet from where he lay unable to look away from the light he saw before him. There was something about the light. Lightning struck a corrugated iron platform. There was something _inside_ the light. He couldn’t move. Voices in his ear piece reached a fever pitch and then slowly started turning to static. He started to sit up, only to find his hand resting on an unfamiliar surface. An unfamiliar sky. The air was scorching hot, searing his lungs. A flash -- Voices. Noises. Flash. Animals -- no, insects -- but wait, that’s not right -- Flash. Eyes. Huge, pale heads with eyes turning to look at him. Too many arms, not enough fingers. It hurt to breathe. Flash. He was back in the disintegrating chamber. And he was screaming. He wasn’t sure when he’d started. Or if he could stop. He felt lightheaded and sick, and his mind couldn’t stop replaying over and over what he’d seen. Where he’d… been. His suit feebly beeped about administering first aid, but whatever the suit could do, it couldn’t stop him shaking. Without warning, the light disappeared.

But not for long. He heard the air rip open, violently, somewhere outside the chamber. He felt a similar vibration coming from somewhere in the floors above him. A small fissure, maybe only three feet tall, opened for a moment on the far side of the chamber, leaving something small and wiggling on the floor, cut neatly in half. _The resonance wasn’t just close to air-perfect,_ Gordon realized in horror. _It WAS air-perfect._ But that was something that was supposed to be impossible, like recreating absolute zero. And now that same vibration would feed on itself, over and over, waves moving out in every direction, tearing at the fabric of reality. At the speed of sound. A resonance cascade. God, how far had it gotten? How long had it been? And what was on the other end of these tears?

Gordon grabbed at some nearby equipment cases to help himself unsteadily to his feet. By now, his earpiece was useless, and he pulled the headset off. The static was replaced with groaning foundations, collapsing ceilings, and some sort of screeching. He heard scattered pops that he thought might have been either rivets or gunshots. The only thing he no longer heard were screams. Even his screams had gone silent, though he could still feel himself trying to produce them. He caught his breath and hobbled towards the exit, feeling his body moving almost of its own accord. Survival. That’s all there was now. He had to get out. Out of this room, this building, away, away from the lights. The crashing. The chaos. He crawled through broken glass, grateful for the thick gloves, when the door refused to open.

He didn’t encounter another person until he was a few hallways away from the epicenter. It was a woman he didn’t know, curled up with her knees to her chest, inside a darkened locked office. He tried to get her attention through the window, but she wasn’t going anywhere. A beige, tortoise-sized creature hobbled up to her and clambered onto her shoulders. She barely noticed. Gordon looked away just in time. When the pounding started on the other side of the door, rhythmic and strangely lacking in urgency, he slowly backed away from the room and started running. The woman could no longer be seen.

 _I need a weapon. I don’t have a weapon. I don’t have anything. I can’t do anything. This is all my fault. I have to get out._ Thoughts spilled through his mind like water through a sieve. He was still making his way in… some direction. He hadn’t given much thought to where he was actually headed. Elevators were clearly a no-go -- some unfortunate escapees had already shown him that -- and he had just started to think he was losing his mind in the darkness and circling pathways when he was stopped dead in his tracks, like a rope yanking him sharply backwards. He lay dazed for a moment before realizing something was stuck between his shoulder blades. It was long, slightly sticky, and he couldn’t get it off. When he started to struggle with it, the slender tendril reacted violently. The entire thing hardened, and in a flash, extended small curved knife hooks that drove straight through the skin of his suit and into the muscles of his upper back. His suit struggled to relay several messages at once: _Heart rate elevated. Please charge suit. Severe lacerations detected. Radiation breach detected. Suit depleted._ The pain intensified as he found himself being dragged upwards, but when he cried out, there was no sound. He just hung there, mouth agape, gasping. _Like a fish on a hook,_ he thought in passing, on the edge of consciousness. Everything started to darken even further when he heard a shout and four concise shots fired from a handgun. He felt the bullets make contact with whatever was pulling him up, as each thud vibrated down the thick, wet line. 

Without warning, the tension that held him wavered and went slack, and he fell crashing to the floor from an almost eight foot drop. The chest plate caught most of the blow, but since the suit was underpowered, it didn’t absorb the impact and redistribute it the way it was designed to. At maximum power, it could take several direct gunshots before the integrity was compromised. As it was now, he’d felt several ribs groan and at least two of them crack. He was struggling to breathe when frenzied hands started running over him, trying to flip him on his back. He vaguely felt the hands grip the cradle behind his neck and pull him jerkily backwards into what had been a small break room. He knew this break room. He’d been in it this morning as he quickly refilled his coffee cup. He idly wondered if the coffee was still hot.

He heard a wheezing, rasping sound coming from his own chest, and the pain of the broken ribs meant he was breathing faster and shallower than he should be, even as he made a conscious effort to slow down. His lungs weren’t punctured, he could tell that much. _It’s just pain,_ he thought. _It’s just pain. Breathe. Breathe._ The man was talking to him, and only when his heart rate started to slow a little could he begin to make out words.

“--Damn things are everywhere. I don’t know what they are. They die easily enough, as long as they don’t sneak up on you. I’ve been trying to radio for help, but can’t get anything through. I’ve been telling everyone I see to get up to the upper levels, to get to the other side of the facility, to get word to anyone. It’s been almost an hour, but nothing’s coming through on any of the radio channels. Glad to see a familiar face though. Them damn barnacle things have gotten several people already. I’ve had to…” Barney stopped speaking for a moment. That’s who that was. He recognized the voice now. “Anyway, that’s the first time I’ve managed to cut somebody loose. Glad it was you.” 

Barney wasn’t looking at him, but was inspecting the back of the suit as Gordon was shifted onto his side. The guard looked pale, but remarkably calm. His hands moved efficiently as they started pulling the tooth-like hooks out of his back one by one. _He’s a really good security guard,_ Gordon thought hazily. _I’d hire him._ He felt his legs twitch every time a tooth was yanked out, strangled cries worming their way out of his burned throat. Barney hesitated at the fifth one, before standing and rifling through something on the wall. Emergency first aid kit. He came back holding a vial of clear liquid, looking unsure what to do with it. Gordon knew. He pushed his arm out from under him, fumbling for a moment before managing to pop open a small window on the forearm of his suit. They’d made the painkiller administration pods match the size of the vials produced in the lab. Of course they had. Barney understood immediately, pressing the vial into place. As soon as Barney clicked the panel shut, Gordon felt the tiny sting of a needle, and then nothing at all.

When he came to, he was still in the room with Barney, the door firmly closed and locked. He’d been moved into an upright sitting position, and found that he didn’t have any problems breathing at all. A small, black tube had been uncoiled from under the lambda symbol on his chest and was attached to the wall somewhere above him. All things considered, he felt remarkable.

“How..?” he rasped, his voice painful but audible. He pointed at the cord coming from his chest. 

“Easy there, cowboy,” Barney chided. “You were trying to reach for the power station on the wall when you passed out. I looked closer at it and it’s got pretty detailed instructions. Same with the one that refills whatever nano-things you science boys use instead of band aids.” Gordon found himself chuckling, and then coughing, and then retching blood. _Internal damage detected._ No kidding. Barney tentatively offered him a hand. Gordon took it. The two of them stood, leaning on each other for what seemed like ages. 

“You gotta go back out there, don’t you?” Barney finally spoke, sounding resigned. Gordon nodded, looking at the floor. “Here, take it. That suit’s no good if you can’t keep the damn things off you.” Gordon looked at Barney’s hand and saw that he was holding out his pistol. He looked at the guard, confused, and shook his head. Barney sighed and put the gun in Gordon’s hand and folded his fingers around it. “I know where to get another,” he reassured him. Gordon didn’t know if he was trying to mollify him or if he was telling the truth, but he started to realize it was the only way. Gordon, with the suit, had the best chance of getting out of there alive to get help. With a weapon, those chances were even better. He loaded the gun with ammo and took an extra pack from Barney and gave the man a firm clasp on the shoulder with a nod that said _I’m going to come back. This isn’t over yet._ He was about to leave the room, door locked behind him, when he turned. _You,_ he mimed. _Me. Beer._


End file.
